July 6, 2026

Season 1, Episode 7

What We Learned: Season 1 Reflections and Big Takeaways

Kala Jones (Host, SERP Literacy Specialist):

 Many of us have experienced it. An eighth graders shrugs when you ask if they want to read out loud. Not defiance, protection. By middle school, a lot of struggling readers have already learned to make themselves small before anyone else can. They joke, they drift, they decide reading isn't their thing and quietly, they decide school isn't either. And somewhere along the way, the adults around them start to agree: they start talking about closed windows and missed moments and what should have happened in third grade. This season is my argument against that. When I started this podcast, I thought I was going to tell you about a reading intervention. I thought I was going to talk about data, design, and implementation, about what the research says, and what the system hasn't yet made possible for schools and the students inside them. And we did talk about all of that. But somewhere between the teaser, where I asked what it even looks like when research and practice truly worked together, and right now, standing on the other side of six episodes and a live SXSW EDU conversation, I realized that's not truly what this season has been all about.

Kala (01:03):

This season has been about belief. Belief that a struggling eighth grader is not a lost cause. Belief that the gap between research and practice doesn't have to stay a gap. Belief that when you hand a student a text that sees them, like really sees them, something unlocks. I'm Dr. Kala Jones and this is SERP Stories, a podcast where we pull back the curtain on research practice partnerships transforming education. And this is our season one finale.

Kala (01:31):

We started with a teaser. A single question. What does it look like when research and practice truly work together? Not research that gets handed to schools with hopes for the best. Research that starts in the classroom and stays there. Episode one answered that question with a story. The story of SERP, what it is, why it exists and the belief, at its foundation, that educators and researchers are stronger when they work side by side. In episode two, we went all the way back to the beginning, to the question that launched STARI. What do you do for a middle schooler who's fallen behind in reading, without making them feel like they're being sent back to second grade? We traced how that question became a curriculum, born out of a real partnership between researchers and educators who refused to design something the classroom couldn't in reality hold. In episode three, we asked what it really takes to scale something that works: evidence, trust, time, and the willingness to keep showing up even when the path gets complicated. Episode four stopped us in our tracks because it wasn't just about reading skills anymore. It was about identity, about what happens when a struggling reader stops seeing themselves as someone who can't and starts believing they can. Linda Diamond and Gloria Ladson-Billings helped us understand that belonging isn't a soft add-on to literacy instruction. It is literacy instruction. Episode five took us to high school, to older adolescents who need literacy support that doesn't talk down to them. We went behind the scenes of STARI's High School series and heard what it looks like when teachers and researchers build something together in real time for real students. And then episode six, live on the SXSW EDU stage. We asked the question that ties everything together: Why are so many teenagers walking away from reading and what brings them back?

Kala (03:13):

Today we answer that fully and together. This is the bridge episode, the one where the science, the theory, the classroom, and the student meet all in the same place. I hope you've been with us all season, but if this is your first time, welcome. Let's get into it.

Kala (03:34):

First, let's start out with some recent recognition of the problem. A signal that what we've been discussing all season is still very much relevant. The Advanced Education Research and Development Fund, AERDF, released findings showing that middle grade students are still struggling with basic reading skills, decoding, fluency, the fundamentals. When I first read that, my honest reaction wasn't surprise. It was recognition, because that is not a new finding. What it does confirm loudly, formally, with research backing is what teachers and students in under-resourced schools have known and documented for over a decade. And what SERP has worked to address for nearly 15 years going back to our partnership with the Boston Public Schools launched in 2005. The data has been there. The students have been there. The question was always, what do we do about it? But here's what AERDEF's conclusions in SERP's response part ways and this matters. Their recommendation to address the problem leans on technology as a solution. Computer programs to adaptively teach basic skills, digital interventions to close the gap. Our executive director, Suzanne Donovan, responded to that recommendation directly. She said:

Suzanne Donovan (SERP Executive Director) (04:42):

Technology can effectively track words per minute, but when students work in pairs, when they alternate roles as reader and timer, that builds their motivation and gives them a shared investment and progress. Those social dimensions of learning are not incidental. They're central to sustained improvement, and they're very, very hard to replicate through a screen.

Kala (05:07):

The season has been my attempt to understand the full picture. The science, yes, but also the humanity underneath it. When a student is in the eighth grade and reading below grade level, the instinct, albeit well-meaning is to go back to the basics. Give them the second grade phonics program, drill the foundation, start over. The problem with that is that an eighth grader knows what second grade material looks like. They know what it means to be handed a book that belongs to a seven-year-old. And the moment a student feels like remediation is a punishment instead of an opportunity, you've lost them. Catherine Snow said it plainly in our conversation this season. She told me.

Catherine Snow (05:45):

It has always struck me as just obstinate and misguided to think that if a 14-year-old can't read the history text, that what we should do is remediate by providing more phonological awareness training. I mean, that the only responses that the districts have are to go back to first and second grade intervention approaches, which most of those 14-year-olds don't need. The vast majority of them are actually capable of reading simple texts. So you have to identify where the challenges are that they haven't been supported to address.

Kala (06:32):

Identify where the challenges are that they haven't been supported to address. Not go back to the beginning, go to the gap. STARI was designed specifically to solve that problem. And I don't mean that loosely. I mean that every single design decision from text selection to structure to the partner reading model was made with that tension in mind. How do you give older students the foundational skills they need without making them feel like they're being held back? Matt Ellinger has been a part of STARI's development from the early days. Here's how he described that design challenge.

Matt Ellinger (07:03):

And from the very beginning, she was talking about the problem with typical remedial materials being in a sense demeaning for the age group because you would get things like cute little fuzzy pictures of puppies or whatever. And this is cute and fine, but it's really embarrassing to carry that book around in eighth grade. So, from the very start, it was about making sure that this was in a way very sophisticated. And that was for the students, to honor the students, and to understand the fact that there's nothing remedial about their life. It's just the fact that they, for some reason or another, didn't get the greatest K-6 experience or whatever in getting introduced to literacy.

Kala (07:58):

Age appropriate, cognitively ambitious, instructionally scaffolded. Those words matter because they describe a choice, a deliberate refusal to have to choose between dignity and compliance. Margaret Troyer has spent her career asking what it really takes to reach an adolescent reader who has already started to give up.

Margaret Troyer (08:16):

By the time kids get to middle school and they're reading two or more years below grade level, they have experienced years of school failure and they generally have pretty negative self-concepts of themselves as readers and many of them have made the really psychologically appropriate choice to opt out of academics and say, "This isn't for me. I'm not a kid who does well in school" because none of us like to do things that we're not good at. And so we've got to hook them back in.

Kala (08:45):

The psychologically appropriate choice to opt out. That framing stopped me when I first heard it because it reframes the resistance student entirely. It's not defiance, it's self-protection. And any intervention that doesn't account for that, that just drills skills without addressing the story underneath them is going to lose students before it ever has a chance to help them. What if we stopped defining adolescent literacy intervention as remediation and started defining it as reentry into intellectual life? That's what Stephanie Simpson from AMLE understood immediately about STARI. She has spent years thinking about what middle schoolers need, not just academically but developmentally. And she was direct about what happens when we forget that.

Stephanie Simpson (AMLE) (09:26):

If kids don't feel like they belong at school, then we've lost the game before we even get to literacy or math instruction or whatever it is that we need to focus on.

Kala (09:36):

We've lost the game before we even get to the instruction. These are the stakes and it's why STARI's design isn't just about what students read. It's about how reading that text makes them feel about themselves. Stephanie put it simply when I asked what she looks for in a program designed for that age group.

Stephanie (09:52):

My litmus test for if something is impactful for this age group is asking the developer, "Have you ever met a 14-year-old?" It's just so important to me from the outset that these are designed with students in mind and with students at the table telling us, "Yeah, this is actually working for me. This is relevant to me."

Kala (10:12):

And when it works, when the design is right, and the students feel seen, something shifts. Teachers start telling us something that sounds simple but isn't. Students really want to come to class. Suzanne shared this story.

Suzanne (10:25):

Carol Mahedy was a literacy director at the Dennis Yarmouth School District and she told me that the year they introduced STARI, a parent cornered her in the school parking lot and said she didn't want her son in a reading intervention class. Carol said she understood her concern, but her son needed a little extra support and STARI would help him to do better in all of his classes, so the mother relented. The next year, the same mother came to see Carol and told her she wanted her son to take a second year of STARI. Carol said he didn't need it. The program worked, he was reading at grade level. And the mother said, "Yeah, but STARI was the only reason he wanted to come to school last year." So computer programs might be successful at teaching students basic skills, but they're never going to be the reason that a student wants to come to school.

Kala (11:15):

Here's where we are. SERP trained 800 teachers in New York City alone last year, 800. And as meaningful as that is, it has barely made a dent in the 70% of secondary students who still struggle with reading and remain underserved. Not because there are no tools, but because too many people still don't know the tools exist. STARI materials have been downloaded over a quarter of a million times and still educators, journalists, and policymakers write and speak as though no one has figured out how to solve this problem. Part of that is the noise. The push towards technology-based solutions has pulled attention away from what the evidence supports and the ongoing debate about the science of reading, what it means, what it requires, and who it's for, has muddled this water even further. We've been so busy arguing about the map that we forgot that there are students sitting in classrooms right now who meet someone to show up with a plan. STARI is that plan. The support for teachers and coaches is there and the excuse that nothing exists, that excuse no longer holds.

Kala (12:18):

There's been another debate that's been consuming a lot of oxygen in education circles over the past several years, the science of reading movement. And the version that shows up in policy conversations often gets flattened into a false choice, structured explicit phonics instruction on one side and whole language approaches or the belief that children can acquire reading through exposure and immersion the way they acquire spoken language on the other. But that framing leaves out something important. The push for culturally relevant equity-centered teaching has never been an opposition to phonics. You can believe, as Gloria Ladson-Billings does, that identity and belonging are central to literacy development and still believe that students must be explicitly taught the code. Those are not competing ideas and they never were. Let's start with what the science of reading actually says and doesn't say about adolescent readers. Catherine Snow has spent decades studying literacy development. I asked her about what the research tells us that schools consistently fail to act on. While she agrees that phonics and phonological awareness are essential, she emphasizes that they are only one part and not the largest part of the picture. Comprehension is the really big challenge.

Catherine Snow (13:24):

What you comprehend of a text as a 10-year-old or a 20-year-old or a 70-year-old is a function of every single experience you've had in your life. It's language, it's knowledge, it's other texts that you've read, it's connections you can make, it's emotional reactions you might have. Comprehension is not like phonological awareness.

Kala (13:51):

Every single experience you've had in your life, that is the scope of what comprehension is. And yet, she told me, "Schools keep treating it like it's a discreet skill to be drilled."

Catherine Snow (14:00):

I don't think you can actually teach reading comprehension. I think you can create contexts, exciting texts, talk about those texts, authentic questions that make students want to go find answers in those texts that enable students to teach themselves to comprehend by virtue of doing the work of comprehending.

Kala (14:25):

Enabling students to teach themselves to comprehend by doing the work of comprehending. That's not a soft idea. That's a structural one. Give students texts that they care about, questions that they want to answer, and the space to wrestle with both. Now, here's where Gloria Ladson-Billings comes in because the question isn't just do we give students engaging texts? It's engaging to whom relevant to whose life built around whose questions. Gloria Ladson-Billings coined the term culturally relevant pedagogy. When I talked with her earlier this season, I asked her what it meant to teach literacy in a way that genuinely affirms students' humanity.

Gloria Ladson-Billings (15:01):

There's nothing new about the notion of prior knowledge. In fact, psychologists say that's how we learn. You don't learn things in isolation and admits they don't stick. We have to connect them to something and we typically connect them to things that we already know. What's challenging, I think, for many of our students, is that they are in classrooms with people who don't know their experience so they have trouble connecting them with things that they already know.

Kala (15:33):

In classrooms with people who don't know their experience, that's the gap. Not a gap in phonics knowledge, not a gap in strategy instruction, a gap in human recognition. And what happens when we try to build literacy without that recognition? Gloria was direct.

Gloria Ladson-Billings (15:47):

When you tell me discreet skills, it's not that we can't learn discreet skills, it's just that we often cannot apply them and put them to use in any other context.

Kala (15:58):

We cannot apply them and put them to use in any other context. That's the science of reading and culturally relevant pedagogy arriving at the same destination from different directions. You need the code and the code needs a context that belongs to the student. STARI was built inside that conviction. The texts are chosen because they matter to adolescents, because they're about things adolescents are genuinely thinking about, immigration, identity, justice, family. The words students decode in STARI are words that carry weight. They appear in stories that already belong to them. Ask Gloria to put the stakes plainly. What happens when we only focus on discrete skills and ignore identity and culture?

Gloria Ladson-Billings (16:38):

If the only thing we do with it is just read it and do nothing, then we will allow everything to just stay as it is. But if we get inspired by it to make change and to make a difference, we can change the world.

Kala (16:52):

If we get inspired by it, that word—inspired—is doing a lot of work. It requires that students be moved by what they read, which requires that what they read moves them, which requires that the people designing their instruction think carefully about whose stories are on those pages. The science of reading and culturally relevant pedagogy were never at war. It's quite the opposite. They were incomplete without each other. STARI is what it looks like when you refuse to choose.

Kala (17:20):

I've been collecting something all season, not on a spreadsheet, but just listening for the places where every guest, regardless of their field, framework or role, arriving at the same truth. Here's what I found, the non-negotiables. One, adolescents are not lost causes. I know that sounds obvious, but in a world where intervention funding concentrates in K-3 and where the conversation about struggling readers often defaults to, "we should have caught this sooner," I need to say it plainly. Eighth grade is not too late. 10th grade is not too late. Catherine Snow said it clearly. We can intervene with middle school kids, with high school kids, with adults. The brain is still learning. The student is still in the room. Two. Decoding is not the whole story and it is also not optional. Both things are true at the same time. A student who cannot decode fluently cannot fully access meaning and a student who can decode but finds nothing in the text that belongs to them will disengage. The science gives us the floor. Culture and identity gives us the ceiling. We need both. Three, relationships are instructional infrastructure. The partner reading model at the heart of STARI is not just the fluency strategy. When two students sit together, take turns, time each other, cheer each other on, they're building a relationship to reading through relationship with another human being. That is not a nice to have. That is how sustained progress happens. Four, teachers need to be trusted. The best tools in the world fail in the hands of educators who feel surveilled, unsupported, or disrespected. STARI works in part because teachers are treated as professionals who can adapt and respond. The training and coaching infrastructure SERP has built is not just about fidelity. It's about dignity. Five. High quality curriculum materials need to be accessible. STARI curriculum materials are available as free downloads. That's a deliberate choice rooted in a belief that the students who most need this intervention should never be the last ones to receive it because the district couldn't afford a multimillion dollar license fee. Free is a value statement. And six, the one that keeps me up at night. The biggest barrier left isn't evidence. It's awareness. So many secondary students still struggle with reading, not because promising solutions don't exist, but because too many people don't know the solutions exist. This is what this podcast has been. Every episode, a bridge from the research to the people who need to know about it.

Kala (19:52):

Now I want to look forward. Imagine a classroom in 2046. A student in the sixth grade who reads two years below grade level sits down in her first STARI class. She's nervous, because she's been embarrassed by reading before. But the text her teacher slides in front of her is about something she knows. Something that touches her real life, and the student beside her isn't judging her. They're partners. They're doing this together. 20 years from now, I want that to be the rule, not the remarkable exception. I want "we caught it in time" to stop being the celebration because the standard should be we never let them fall through. STARI is the bridge we are building, plank by plank, classroom by classroom, student by student. And maybe the next plank gets built by someone listening right now. A teacher trying something different tomorrow. A principal rethinking where intervention lives in the schedule, a district leader searching for a better answer, a researcher asking harder questions about what implementation really requires. That's how this work moves forward. And the bridge, it's already open.

Kala (20:56):

I started this season with a question I thought I already knew the answer to. Why do so many adolescents struggle to read and what do we do about it? I didn't know it as completely as I thought. What I know now, after seven episodes, after conversations with researchers, teachers, curriculum designers, practitioners, and theorists, is that the answer is not simple, but it is knowable and it is actionable, and that matters enormously. The AERDF data wasn't a surprise to any of us at SERP, but it was a reminder. A reminder that the problem is not behind us, that the urgency is real, and a reminder of something else, that the people working on this problem have not given up. Gloria Ladson-Billings shared something with me this season that I kept returning to. She talked about the generations of her own family, great-great-grandparents who were enslaved, grandparents who sharecropped, parents who lived under legal segregation. Every generation faced something that seemed impossible and every generation worked against it anyway. She said.

Gloria Ladson-Billings (21:52):

Just because something is impossible doesn't mean it's not worth doing. Our task is to educate these kids. It's not a harder task in slavery. It's not harder than those other generations tasks, but it is our task. And I think we have got to be clear that we can't abdicate this responsibility. We have to do it. We don't have another choice.

Kala (22:21):

We don't have another choice. That is the only note I want to leave this season on. Not despair, not urgency without direction. Hope with teeth, purpose, with a plan. The bridge is open and all we have to do now is make sure everyone knows it's there. To every guest who gave their time this season, thank you. To the SERP team who builds tools worth talking about, thank you. To the teachers, coaches, administrators, and students at the center of it all, you are the reason. And to you, listener, educator, advocate, maybe a researcher who stumbled on a podcast they didn't expect to stay up listening to. Thank you for being here. You are why we tell these stories. Well, that's a wrap on season one of SERP stories. If you want to learn more about STARI, visit SERPinstitute.org/stari. If the season moves something in you, share it.

Kala (23:11):

Leave us a review. Tell a colleague, tell a principal, tell someone who makes decisions about kids. I'm Dr. Kala Jones and it's been an honor to be your guide. Until next time, keep building a bridge. See you next season.